Approaching Barbra Streisand’s kid sister to ask about her return to Provincetown’s Crown and Anchor, where she’ll perform two concerts Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 2-3, seems at first a bit daunting. For this show queen, it feels a little like interviewing Princess Margaret under the ever-present shadow of her sovereign sister.

Rob Phelps

The simple truth about Rosyln Kind is that she is, in fact, very kind.

Approaching Barbra Streisand’s kid sister to ask about her return to Provincetown’s Crown and Anchor, where she’ll perform two concerts Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 2-3, seems at first a bit daunting. For this show queen, it feels a little like interviewing Princess Margaret under the ever-present shadow of her sovereign sister.

Nine years Babs’ junior, Kind followed in the footsteps of her sister’s career in show business. Such a life choice seems fraught with peril. Liza Minnelli’s sister Lorna Luft, for example, is a very talented woman but tends to be referred to as Judy Garland’s other daughter, which doesn’t sound like much fun — at least not for the star-struck or the celebrity-obsessed. So this reporter’s plan was to ask a few tactful questions about Kind’s relationship with Streisand and then move quickly on to Kind’s own professional successes on Broadway, in movies and television and in concert.

Comparisons to Streisand are, nevertheless, quite apt in that both voices are lavish, exquisitely polished, and (to show true queen stripes) each is “a rose of sheer perfection.”

You can’t help but to hear the family resemblance. Both currently cover similar territory in and around the great American songbook. Both look like a million bucks with their tastefully coiffured hair and chic gowns. Both voices easily rise above full orchestras and fall to a whisper beside a single accompanist bringing an audience to pin-dropping silence.

But playing one degree of separation ends after just a phrase or two from either one. Their voices are just plain joys to the ear and what either one does with hers is clearly her own business.

As for the family, Kind is about as down-to-earth as they come, eagerly anticipating a Rosh Hashanah family reunion right after the Provincetown shows. She talks about her family as though they’re your neighbors down the street — so much so that this reporter would not have been surprised by an invitation to join them for the holiday seder.

Fresh off a world tour earlier this summer where Kind and Streisand performed together to crowds of thousands at such state-of-the-art stadiums as London’s O2 Arena and Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield sports center, Kind is eager to talk about it all. In London, they did the Judy Garland-Liza Minnelli version of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “Get Happy.” In Israel, the sisters changed up their act to Nat King Cole’s “Smile,” which, says Kind, “I loved better because it’s in a much lower register, so I got a chance to belt.”

“My sister taught me how to harmonize,” Kind says, jumping right off the subject of the world tour to one of her favorite stories about their mother giving them a reel-to-reel tape recorder into which the two girls belted out old standards like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Mule Named Sal” and “Don’t Throw Bouquets at Me” (“People Will Say We’re in Love”).

As a grown-up, Kind says she loves “dabbling in swing jazzy stuff.” Her favorite repertoire, she says, includes love ballads and story songs.

Asked if she knows what she plans to sing at the Crown, she says, “I do, but I’m not going to tell.” But then she adds that she’ll do at least two numbers she did when she first played the Provincetown, also at the Crown and Anchor, in 1995 — “Can You Read My Mind?” and “Meadowlark.”

Like Streisand, Kind loves to take well-known numbers and make them her own. It’s more than simply “unplugging” a pop song; both sisters seem to absorb every lyric and musical phrase, taking them in, turning them over in their hearts and then delivering something entirely new, rich, lush and sincere to the last note.

And once they’ve got you with all that sincerity, out pops a joke or two.

In every show she says she always looks right into the audiences’ eyes. When she spots someone who’s obviously going through something tough, “I sing hardest towards them,” she says. “I go out there wanting to make people happy. That’s my goal. In the world today, where there’s so much difficulty, anger, hard times and hurting, if I can go out there and sing for 60 or 90 minutes and make people happy, make them forget their troubles,” that, she says, is what it’s all about.

Links

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
Wicked Local Provincetown ~ P.O. Box 977 Provincetown, MA 02657 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service